BBBT Podcast Transcript

Transcription

1 BBBT Podcast Transcript About the BBBT Vendor: The Boulder Brain Trust, or BBBT, was founded in 2006 by Claudia Imhoff. Its mission is to leverage business intelligence for industry vendors, for its members, who are independent analysts and experts, and for its subscribers, who are practitioners. To accomplish this mission, the BBBT provides a variety of services, centered around vendor presentations. For more, see: Composite Software Date recorded: July 26, 2013 Host: Guest(s): Claudia Imhoff, President, BBBT Robert Eve, Executive VP, Marketing Run time: 00:09:10 Audio link: Composite Software Podcast Transcript: [See next page] Transcribed By: CastingWords Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 1 of 6

2 Claudia Imhoff: Welcome to this special edition of the Boulder BI Brain Trust podcast. I m Claudia Imhoff and I m here in Grants Pass, Oregon, at the Humphrey Strategic Communications annual Pacific Northwest BI Summit. I m pleased to have the opportunity to interview each of the vendors attending this event. With me is Robert Eve. He is the Executive Vice President of Marketing for Composite Software and soon to be, we'll talk about this, the Director of Data Virtualization Product Marketing at Cisco. Hello, Bob. Nice to have you with us. Robert Eve: Great to see you, Claudia. Let's talk about the state of data virtualization adoption. It seems like it's accelerating. Would you agree? Yeah. It's been a slow growth to now, about 10 years...there are some statistics from Gartner and TDWI that say it's about 20 to 27 percent adoption in companies today. That's even just the starting point, because those are first projects. There's plenty of headroom for those to grow in those cases. Wayne Eckerson, our friend from TechTarget, just completed a survey. The respondents said about 33 percent more users will adopt in the next 18 months. It really is accelerating. Remarkable, because I remember when it was just in its infancy. You're right; it took a while to get traction. I'm kind of curious to that effect. Why do you see this traction? What are the business drivers behind data virtualization? I think businesses are finally realizing they're in a race, and the ability to leverage their data is going to differentiate the leaders from the folks who fall behind. I think, in that race, it's about agility. As you know, the data warehouse is great at a number of things, but it's far from agile, because there are so many moving parts. Hard to change it. Hard to change it, and doesn't adapt super-fast to a changing business environment. To complement that, people are now seeing data Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 2 of 6

3 virtualization as this enabling capability. It's more virtual, based on views and services, less physical, and so they're getting agility to get those information requirements. The business is able, then, to change its mind. "I need new data. I need new analytics. I need whatever." The drivers, from a business standpoint, would be this incredible pressure on them to be able to switch and turn on a dime. Turn on a dime. For example, Qualcomm says, with data virtualization, they now think in terms of days and hours, not weeks and months. Pfizer. Our friend, Mike Linhares, who came to the BBBT, he'll talk about responding to executive information requests times faster. Wow. That's the business driver, that agility, get that information. Really quickly. Let's turn the tables a little bit. What are the technological drivers, then? We all talk about the big data and the volumes of data, but it's also the distribution of data. When everything was in the warehouse in some marts, and all in the same computer room, distribution of data wasn't so much of an issue. Now we've got these analytic appliances. We have Salesforce and Workday and the cloud. People are moving their data centers to the cloud, with Amazon. You get data from outside service providers -- Thomson Reuters. The data is distributed everywhere. In that distributed mode, how do you pull datasets together to answer those business problems, to drive more revenue, to cut costs, to meet compliance requirements? Data virtualization is the answer for that. You certainly don't want to have to physically move the data around if you don't want to. That's the goal, right? More cost to do that. Yeah. Move it around when you have to, and if that makes sense from a management or a control point of view. Once you've made some of those decisions, you're still going to need that data with some other data, Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 3 of 6

4 so let's use data virtualization to glue that data together and meet that business need. Absolutely. You've mentioned a couple of customers. Why don't you continue down that path? I'd actually like to hear how companies are using data virtualization. There are really two models, I think, that people use. The agile BI type of use cases -- so R&D informatics, some customer analytics, that sort of thing -- that's at the project basis. They tend to use the word "agile" in front of it, agile consolidated view of positions and trades, agile risk management, et cetera. Then, in a complementary fashion, they're starting to think more in terms of a data-management architecture. You guys call it the extended data warehouse, you and Colin. In that model, they're really thinking enterprise-wide. How is it that I can manage all my data properly, from an IT point of view, and optimize it there, but then how do I surface that to the business more? They use words like data layer, data services -- just some terms from the last 18 months and our customers -- BI agility data layer, self-service data-access platform, data integration hub, trades and market data layer. It's this architectural point of view that they're bringing to bear. Half the customers today buy for that architecture right from the start, and the other half are still in that project thinking. That's interesting. Actually, you're right. Nothing has helped you more than the distribution of data all over the place. It's the key element of we had the business driver the information. You just can't do it the old way. The technology is too compelling to use these different data stores and approaches for each individual problem. Then, when you have problems that span those business challenges... That's where you guys shine. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What we've done, we've had all these new opportunities to create these new options. People are deploying them and gaining huge value from these stand alone approaches, but how do when then cobble them back together when we need to? Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 4 of 6

5 Well, speaking of new opportunities, [laughs] you have some pretty exciting news of your own, right? Let's talk about that just a little bit. Yeah, June 20 th, Cisco announced their intent to acquire our Composite Software and that deal with close in the next several months. We're very excited about that because it's just a wonderful opportunity for our customers. Because of it, we'll be able to go to market more fully, around the world, with better service and support. More complete service and support and sales and better support them around the world. Also, we'll have more capital to continue to expand the product because as these requirements, from these different types of data and systems have proliferated, our development agenda has expanded. More connectors, connectors, connectors. Connectors and speed. It's interesting how does the network come into play as we start to distribute data more and more and more. You can see some of the logic for Cisco and Composite. An interesting one. What's nice is in about three weeks, Composite and Cisco are going to be coming to a Boulder BI Brain Trust. That's August 16th. I am so excited to hear the entire story. Yeah, we want to share it with you. Mike Flannigan, who's the General Manager of the Integration Brokerage Technology Group, where Composite will be reporting and I will join you guys there. We will talk about the logic. We want to engage the BBBT in some brain storming around where you guys think the combination of Cisco and Composite will add value for our customers. I'm pretty sure you'll get some feedback there. We hope to. All right, thanks so much. Again, I'm will Robert Eve. He's the Executive Vice President of Marketing for Composite Software now, but is soon to be the Director of Data Virtualization Product Marketing at Cisco. Thank you so much, Robert. Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 5 of 6

6 Thank you. Thank you for listening to this special edition of the BBBT podcast, and thanks to Scott Humphrey for giving me this opportunity and for hosting the Pacific Northwest BI Summit. Copyright 2013 BBBT - All Rights Reserved Page 6 of 6